


Salve, Regina

by Blurgle



Category: The Tudors (TV), Tudor History - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 18:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13664826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blurgle/pseuds/Blurgle
Summary: January 1536: a king, a horse, a princess, a new start.





	Salve, Regina

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to an excellent prompt by Tumblr user @queenmarytudor.

24 January 1535/6

 

The cook at Hatfield House has been given strict instructions not to send trays up to the shabby little room under the eaves where the King’s bastard daughter is housed. If the _Lady_ Mary wishes to dine or sup, she has been told, she must do so in the Great Hall below the dais where the true heir to the throne, the _Princess_ Elizabeth, is served. Yet the cook is also a kind, motherly woman, and every evening without fail a loaf of bread and a piece of good English cheese appear as if by magic in the cubbyhole right next to the back stairs.

It’s the only sustenance _Princess_ Mary has most days.

Mary scurries upstairs with her meal as silently and as single-mindedly as a mouse with a crumb, only stopping to breathe when the door to her room latches shut behind her. The servants are on her side – if they weren’t, she would have been caught by now – but it’s still her duty not to put them on the spot lest they have to choose between supporting their Princess and keeping their jobs. But she’s too hungry to think about them at the moment, too hungry by far to do anything but fall upon the bread and cheese like a beggar at the gate of one of her father’s palaces.

 _Some day I will dine in state,_ she tells herself as she sucks the last lingering crumbs off her fingers, _but until that moment my only duty is to survive._

Prayer is her solace, her greatest source of strength, but since the awful news of her mother’s death arrived three weeks ago it’s also become her refuge from the grief that at times threatens to consume her whole; as she kneels and makes the sign of the cross she begs God to lift Queen Katherine’s soul out of the flames of Purgatory and place her among the saints where she surely belongs. She then asks the Holy Virgin to spread her soothing grace over her own anguished heart, beseeches the Lord to dash the blinders from her father’s eyes, begs St. Edward and St. George to watch over her sister – but then a faint noise disturbs her concentration.

Someone has slipped a note under the door.

She says a final _Salve, Regina_ as she carries the note to the lone candle burning in the corner of the room and breaks the blank seal, but then she spots the first two words—

> _Your Majesty_  
> 

It can’t be, no, no…

> _Your Majesty_

Her father is…he’s…and he will never – he can’t…

> _Your Majesty_

Somehow, she doesn’t know how, she stifles the scream forming in her throat; she can’t make a sound, she can’t cry out loud, she cannot give anyone reason to know…

> _Your Majesty_

They will kill her if they find this letter.

They will kill her if she doesn’t act first.

Her hands by now are shaking so badly she can barely see the words but she knows time is of the essence: she takes a deep breath, braces her wrists against the table, and forces herself to read the hastily scribbled note.

> _Your Majesty, most noble Queen,_
> 
> _It is with a heavy heart that I advise Your Majesty that your most noble father, our sovereign lord King Henry of late and happy memory, went to God this morning at Greenwich Palace. His Majesty was practising in the tiltyard when his charger slipped in the mud and fell upon him, breaking his legs; it was only after he was carried to the surgeon’s tent that it was discovered his skull was also fractured. His Majesty lingered for two hours but his breath stilled and his ghost fled to Heaven just as the bells rang for Sext._

Mary has been without a father for five hours.

She has been Queen of England for five hours.

> _The Lady Marquess of Pembroke (she who styles herself Queen) will certainly make an attempt in the very near future to secure the throne for the bastard in her belly or, failing the birth of a son, the Lady Elizabeth. I therefore urge Your Majesty in the strongest possible terms to act with all haste lest your realm be lost to those who would carry it to Hell. To this effect, Sir Nicholas Carew and I have departed Westminster and are on our way north to convey Your Majesty to whichever palace you see fit to occupy. The messenger who carries this letter will attend on you upon our arrival and lead you to us._
> 
> _I urge Your Majesty to do nothing that might alert your captors._
> 
> _I am and always will be, Your Majesty’s most humble servant,_
> 
> _EXETER_

For a moment she can’t stand, can’t think, can’t do anything but bury her face in her hands as hot tears stream down her cheeks and memories of her father’s goodness, kindness, and strength flood her mind. To die while caught in the thrall of a witch and her heretic family: he will surely need her prayers and those of everyone in England. They said fifty thousand Masses for her grandfather the old King, but Father will need fifty times fifty thousand, and what is she to do with—

But she doesn’t have time to grieve, can’t afford to take chances; she scrubs the tears from her face and tosses the letter in the meagre fire burning in the grate, waiting until it shrivels into nothing before turning to her trunks. To be Queen—

— _she is Queen of England—_

_—she is the most powerful woman in the world—_

—to be Queen she requires nothing but her person, but if she is to ride to London in the night she will need to dress warmly. She accordingly changes into her warmest and most voluminous skirts and her thickest hose and is lacing up her heaviest boots when someone taps at the door three times in quick succession, then twice.

She cracks the door open; the groom on the other side glances around him, then drops to one knee and mouths, “Your Majesty.”

It is time.

She drapes her cloak over her shoulders and slowly, silently, they creep down the back stairs and past the guard sprawled (and snoring, thank God; she would not have liked to see him dead) beside the rear garden door. The heavy wooden slab swings open and she emerges; emerges into her realm, her country, her England.

Never again, she promises herself, will she be beholden to any but the Lord.

They make their way by the light of a low crescent moon toward an ancient oak in the southwest corner of the park where four men await her: her cousin the Marquis of Exeter, her mother’s faithful supporter Sir Nicholas Carew, a lone guard, and the one man she’d hoped to see more than anyone else on this day. “Excellency?”

Eustache Chapuys falls to his knees. “Your Majesty, I offer you my deepest condolences.”

That nearly undoes her, but she presses her lips together and forces herself to smile until the tears no longer threaten to fall. “We thank Your Excellency. My Lord Exeter, Sir Nicholas, we thank you as well,” she says as they kneel and the marquis places in her hand a gold bauble: her father’s signet ring.

This is real.

Her father is truly dead.

The ring is heavy in her palm, even heavier still on her finger, and although her first urge again is to scream she contents herself with a quiet “Thank you” as she gestures to them to rise.

“Your Majesty, we should leave anon,” Sir Nicholas dares to say once he’s back on his feet. “If we depart immediately we’ll reach Westminster well before midnight, but if we don’t you might be missed soon and a party will be sent after us.”

“I’ve placed my own men at The Tower and Westminster Palace, madam, but wherever you wish to travel I give you my word you will be most welcome,” Exeter adds. “Our horses are with a second guard just outside the fence. My good lady wife reminded me before I left that your mother taught you to ride astride.”

It is clear they are waiting for her to make the first move – of course they are; she is Queen now – but before she passes through the gate she gives Hatfield House one last look over her shoulder and whispers, “a Domino factum est illud et est mirabili in oculis nostris.”

 _This is the Lord’s doing and it is miraculous in our eyes;_ but what kind of miracle requires the death of one’s mother and father within three short weeks?

They mount and head south, keeping up a brutal pace for (as Exeter tells her) he has horses and additional guards waiting for them at Chipping Barnet. “I didn’t think it prudent to approach Hatfield with a larger guard lest we be spotted,” he explains as they approach the village of Bell Bar.

“And how did you learn of…of my father’s demise?” she stammers. “Were you at Greenwich?”

“I brought the sad tidings to him, madam,” Sir Nicholas cuts in. “I was in the surgeon’s tent when your lord father the King breathed his last; as soon as it became clear I wouldn’t be missed I removed his ring, took to my horse, and raced westward to advise His Lordship. We thought it best to remove ourselves to Hatfield immediately, and came across His Excellency just north of Potter’s Bar.”

She frowns at Chapuys. “You left London before my father died?”

“Yes, Majesty, as soon as news of the accident reached my ears. My master the Emperor might prefer that I remain in London at such a delicate moment but – I know it is a difficult topic still, but if I may speak of your lady mother, Queen Katherine?”

The pain is almost too much to bear, but she pushes through it and bids him to continue, “for there will never come a day when I do not wish to hear of her.”

“Then I will tell you that I visited Her Majesty only days before she ascended to glory. During our last meeting she bade me make a solemn vow that, were it in my power, I would hasten to your side the moment God raised you to the throne and offer you my services as diplomat – or priest, if you prefer.”

“I – thank you,” she chokes out, “but I had no idea…will the Emperor not—”

“Majesty, your cousin the Emperor has hundreds of good men in his service,” Exeter points out. “You on the other hand need men of experience to speak for you not just here in England but at foreign courts and at the Vatican as well.”

“My first duty is to bring peace and stability to England in these dark days,” she says, “but you are right; my second is to reconcile with the Holy Catholic Church and return my realm to faith and obedience. Very well, Excellency; I welcome you into my service with thanks.”

They point their steeds down Bell’s Hill while Mary considers her first move. Something will have to be done about the Boleyns, of course; Lord Wiltshire and his feckless son can go into the darkest dungeons of the Tower, but if the whore is indeed with child she cannot possibly be treated with the same severity. It would be poetic justice were she to be imprisoned at Kimbolton but she isn’t fit to set foot in the house her mother died in; The More, on the other hand…and she smiles. Let the bitch live out her final days among Wolsey’s servants, who will remind her at every turn of exactly what she did to him.

Of course she also has to figure out what to do with Elizabeth and her bastard brother, Henry Fitzroy, who has been taught to think himself a prince despite being nothing more than an inconvenient by-blow. Her sister she could place in a light, fashionable convent where she could be raised in comfort while remaining out of the public eye, but Fitzroy…she could offer him—

“Hold!”

“What is this?!”

“The _Queen!_ Save the—”

“Flee, Madam! Flee!”

She turns her horse’s head and it leaps over a dark shape in the road (a horse? The guard? Chapuys?) but before she can escape there’s an icy sharpness at her neck—

—she falls, turning, spinning—

—the cold turns to searing pain, the back of her head slams against the ground—

—a horse bounds away in the moonlight, a woman’s body drooped over the saddle, blood spraying out from her neck—

_—to Jesus I commend—_

 

* * *

 

  
24 January 1562/3

 

King Henry the Ninth likes to think of himself as a temperate, moderate man. He dines and sups abstemiously, prefers his ale hopped and his wine watered, takes exercise every morning, spends at least eight hours a day at his desk or in the Council chambers, and if he does not love Queen Dorothea as he did Queen Mary and Queen Kateryn, may God give them both rest, he still treats her with the utmost respect.

There is however one matter on which he will not bend: he always spends the eve of the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul here at Greenwich among the portraits of his predecessors – and tonight may be the last time he does so.

It’s been twenty-seven years since that fateful day, twenty-seven years since his placid, unchanging life as the half-forgotten Duke of Richmond was shattered by the dreadful news of his father’s death, followed the next day by the even more devastating news of his sister Mary’s murder by agents of Thomas Cromwell, his father’s chief minister. Within a week Cromwell and Queen Anne’s father, Lord Wiltshire, had been strung up in Cornhill and the Queen and her unborn son were dead of what the physicians deemed ‘grief and shock’, which apparently came in a little green bottle back then; by the fifth of February great sections of the city had been torn apart by furious mobs and the North had risen. Three weeks the tumult raged, three weeks of riots, assassinations, and lawless horrors; three weeks it took for the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk to shift their lazy arses and hammer out a deal to raise a new King to the throne.

They chose him.

Bastard, whoreson, duke twice over, sickly boy of sixteen: he, Henry Fitzroy, was taken to Westminster Abbey and crowned King of England before the ink on the agreement had the chance to dry.

He didn’t think the people would stand for it at first. His father did after all have a legitimate child – legitimate by law, at least – and although no one would have chosen two-year-old Elizabeth Tudor over nineteen-year-old Mary, he couldn’t imagine they would prefer him to the child of an anointed queen. He hadn’t realized then that the common people to a man thought Elizabeth no less a bastard than he; more so, perhaps, since his mother had never pretended to be anything other than what she was.

 _But it all started here,_ he thinks as he looks up at his father’s portrait again; _it started here, and it started with you – and you, sir, were the real bastard._

There is no doubt in his mind that everything from the riots to the destruction of Westminster Hall and the murders of Mary Tudor and Anne Boleyn happened because his father could or would not control his unbounded appetites. Had he been less hungry for glory he wouldn’t have been in the tiltyard in the first place; had he disciplined himself at table he wouldn’t have been too fat for his horse to carry him. If he’d married for policy and allowed love to grow afterwards like a normal king he wouldn’t have left so many plausible claimants to the throne, and if he hadn’t let his servants wax powerful while he frittered away his days and nights on mindless, stupid frivolities he wouldn’t have created a monster like Cromwell.

“Fitz?”

He smiles at his sister and heir as she enters the long gallery and falls into an elegant curtsey that belies the stark solemnity of her widow’s weeds. Elizabeth is twenty-nine and by some miracle the only Tudor since Owen to produce a houseful of strapping sons; he can only thank God for all five of them, and little Mary too. “I’m glad you came today,” he says. “I wasn’t sure if you would.”

She pauses in front of Holbein’s portrait of her mother, one finger tracing the lines of Queen Anne’s richly adorned gable hood. “Neither was I until this morning. How are you?”

“No worse,” he lies. “Tom Vicary was nattering something about black bile but I don’t think my humours have ever been truly balanced. Did you bring the children?”

“Only Robin. Hal and Will are at Hatfield, John was screaming like a holy terror, and Tom and Mary are still inconsolable. They miss him so badly, Fitz; we all do.”

He makes comforting noises and solemnly promises to visit Eltham on the morrow, and if he is privately grateful that Robert Dudley has fallen in battle before Bess has had the chance to succeed he is careful not to show it. She loved him and he in turn gave her six healthy children; there must have been some manner of good in the man.

By now Bess is standing in front of their sister’s portrait, painted (or so he’s been told) when she was twelve and all but betrothed to the King of France. “Archbishop Cranmer told me she was promised at one point or another to every prince in Christendom,” she says to him over her shoulder. “I’ll never understand why he didn’t marry her off to some minor princeling and get a few grandsons out of her. Didn’t the King of Portugal have six or seven sons? Surely he could have spared one.”

“If our father had possessed the slightest bit of common sense, Bess, neither of us would be here,” he reminds her. “He might have been a brilliant and talented man but in every way that mattered he was a rank fool.”

At that she grins. “You should know; you’re the King of England.”

They chat about other things – the Peace of Calais, bought with Robert Dudley’s blood; the state of the Northern monasteries where, as he points out, they engage in useful work that saves the royal treasury thousands of pounds per annum; Queen Dorothea’s new pastor, a dyed-in-the-wool reformer like Bess, if much less tolerant of Henry’s Catholic leanings – until the patter of tiny feet alerts them to a visitor. “Uncle King!”

He prays he can hide the fact that he no longer has the strength to lift a child of five but thankfully Robin doesn’t leap into his arms as he usually does; he instead stops short and, after a nod from his mother, drops into a most regal bow. “What’s this, Your Highness?” Henry asks his sister as he ruffles his middle nephew’s night-black hair. “I was expecting you to bring me a baby Robin and you’ve brought me a big, strong Prince instead.”

The boy’s eyes – Dudley’s eyes, set in Anne Boleyn’s face – light up just like they always do. “It’s me, Uncle King! I’m your Robin!”

“And so you are!” he replies before shepherding the both of them out of the Long Gallery.

Bess and Robin return to Eltham after supper leaving him more content than he’s felt all month; after his usual evening visit to his Queen – a woman of immense kindness and remarkable self-sufficiency – he returns to the Long Gallery and the portraits of his family, illuminated now in soft candlelight. There’s his first stepmother, Queen Katherine, she of the plump cheeks, pale eyes, and flaming red hair; his second stepmother, Queen Anne, dark and sleek; his elder sister, Queen Mary (as he has proclaimed her), all smiles and long lashes; his younger sister, Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Pembroke and Richmond; his wives, Howard, Parr, and Oldenburg, all in a row; his own mother, the lovely Lady Tallboys; his grandparents, King Henry and Queen Elizabeth; his nephews and baby niece; and once again his father, tall, red-haired, broad of shoulder, magnificently garbed, one hand holding a scroll on which is printed a verse from the Gospel of Mark.

 _Did you truly understand what you were doing?_ he asks the portrait. _Did you cast your wife and daughter away to punish them, or was it just the easiest way to get what you wanted?_

But the portrait doesn’t answer; it never does, damn its eyes.

The pain in his side suddenly returns with a vengeance; he summons a servant to douse the candles and returns upstairs, pausing on the landing until the hard lump in his belly settles and he can walk without grimacing. Vicary told him that morning that he doesn’t think Henry has much longer (praise God for honest physicians!), but he’s made his will and he knows Cranmer and Cecil will be there for Bess once it’s time for her to wear the crown. Still, he can’t help but wonder what might have happened if—

—but perhaps he’ll know that soon enough.


End file.
